Is there any other critic who inspires as much loathing as James Wood? He has been the object of broadsides by writers — many of them his targets — from Salman Rushdie to Jonathan Lethem to Colson Whitehead. Wood is the sole subject of the website Contra James Wood (if you don’t find that unusual, try to imagine a website called, say, Contra Leonard Maltin).

It’s not hard to see why. At his best, Wood is as good as it gets nowadays, but at his worst, he brings an often irrelevant anti-magic realist and neo-Christian agenda and writes with a fussily poetic yet inaccurate style. As Wood himself might put it, he “exhausts negative superlatives.” Wood can carry on with an obliviousness to his own grating pomposity and puts you in mind of no one so much as the adult who’s been wearing a suit and toting a briefcase since the fifth grade.

Imagine, then, my surprise when I first read the title essay in Wood’s latest collection of essays, ” The Fun Stuff.” Part memoir, part analysis, part celebration, the title essay (subtitled “Homage to Keith Moon”) takes what for many is an indistinct pleasure — rock drumming — and makes it vivid and tangible:

Keith Moon-style drumming is a lucky combination of the artful and the artless … he kept his snare pretty ‘dry’… How a drummer hits the snare, and how it sounds, can determine a band’s entire dynamic. Groups like Supertramp and the Eagles seem soft, in large part, because the snare is so drippy and mildly used (and not just because elves are apparently squeezing the singers’ testicles).

The writing is funny and relaxed, and the personal note graceful and offhand: The surprise is that Wood is, of all things, a rock drummer himself. It is, after all, a truth universally acknowledged that the drummer is the dimmest and least articulate guy in the band.

I was one happy reader after I finished the essay, and I looked forward to a collection of vivid first-person accounts of James Wood bungee-jumping, swinging in the suburbs, maybe cruising South Beach with DMX.

Alas, there’s nothing else remotely fun about “The Fun Stuff,” just a lot of solidly old-fashioned lit-crit essays. The best of these is “Wounder and Wounded,” a reappraisal of novelist V.S. Naipaul based upon Patrick French’s biography. Wood does what a good biographical critic should do — he finds a powerful shaping metaphor that accounts for both the writer’s work and life. The central revelation of French’s work, that Naipaul was an ardent sadomasochist, is subtly extended to the fiction, which is concerned above all with power relations and vulnerability. Wood notes, with great insight:

Naipaul is enraging and puzzling , especially to those who themselves come from postcolonial societies, because his radicalism and conservatism are so close to each other-each response is descended from the same productive shame.

Writing about the limitations of Flaubert, the critic Hugh Kenner noted that there are writers for whom the unit is not the sentence but the event. Wood is at best dealing with lapidary writers — sentence writers — especially a fellow critic-novelist and pasticheur like Alan Hollinghurst who, like Wood, has much of English Literature at his mental fingertips.

Wood is less successful with a Red State throwback like Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy hews his works from slabs of granite and deals with grand themes and elemental emotions. In McCar-thy’s spare post-apocalyptic novel, “The Road,” there is a scene in which the father comes across a can of Coke in a burnt-out supermarket and gives it to his son, who has no idea what it is. For McCarthy, the can of Coke is clearly no more than a powerful symbol of the privation of the novel’s worldscape. Wood, based on zero textual evidence, surmises:

Surely McCarthy is knowingly playing here — not only with the American iconicity of the Coke Can, but with iconic artworks about American icons, like Edward Hopper’s Gas … and Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup tins.

The main trouble, though, with a reactionary critic like Wood is that faced with the major talents of our time — writers such as David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo — daring and sometimes-overreaching writers who are insufficiently respectful of the great tradition of the English realist novel, he tends to run the other way. And instead elevates a watery Gatsby pastiche like Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland.”

In a rare moment of self-revelation, Wood notes about Keith Moon’s playing:

[It’s] like an ideal sentence of prose, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never had the confidence to: a long, passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-interrupted, attired but disheveled, careful and lawless, right and wrong.